The 17 Best Failed TV Shows Of The 80s (As Judged By Their Openings)

Sarah Marshall: I’m
not especially proud of any of the hobbies I used to waste my free
time, but perhaps the most inexplicable is my fondness for watching
compilations of old TV themes on YouTube. As a general rule, I love
all sludgy runoff of pop culture past and present, and the themes
to failed 80s TV shows provide its most potent concentration: the
montages, the glittery synth music, the streetwise detectives
running on the beach in tiny shorts. I vacillate between feeling
ashamed of how many no-name actors I routinely recognize, and
feeling that I’m spending my leisure time in exactly the
right way.

Michael Magnes: It’s oddly thrilling to watch, say, Bryan
Cranston, as a twenty-something playing a thug on “The Flash,” or
Anna Gunn, face showing the barest hint of the Skyler White rictus,
going down to the Jersey Shore on the imaginatively named “Down to
the Shore,” and then to watch them on a critically-acclaimed
prestige drama. It’s like finding porn in your father’s closet. Or
finding out that he was a porn star. Or finding out that he was
human. If celebrities are our gods then these are their humble
beginnings.

So, in that spirit, here are seventeen of our favorite TV themes
from the 80s—the ones that led us to feel the most confusion,
amusement, and fear (ideally all at once).

1. “Hello, Larry!”: Before “Frasier” And “Portlandia”

Sarah: Watching TV theme compilations has exposed us to
some gems, including the deeply terrifying “We Got It
Made,” the apparently chess-based ” It’s Your Move”
(described by the good soul who uploaded the theme as “perhaps
Jason Bateman’s best TV work”), and my all-time favorite, “Hello,
Larry!”—the theme for which convinced us to watch actual
episodes, God help us.

Michael: McLean Stevenson left “M*A*S*H” to star in this,
one of the biggest turds on American television ever. “Hello,
Larry!” is a sitcom about a guy who lives in Portland, Oregon: The
song would have us believe that he lives in Portland because he’s a
miserable, divorced failure. Comedy in motion! Beats the rape jokes
on Chuck Lorre shows, though.

Maybe Larry was really the original hipster. In some ways he
was. McLean Stevenson left the most popular TV show in existence to
star in a sitcom about a newly divorced, radio shrink man raising
his daughters. I know, I know. A radio shrink in the Pacific
Northwest? That’ll never work! Ever! Not even if they do an episode
where the hoity-toity radio shrinks bonds with his working-class
cop father by watching “Antiques Roadshow.”

In season one Larry had a morbidly obese sound engineer as his
witless comedic foil, but producers replaced him in season two with
Meadowlark Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters. The theme song goes
on to say, “You talk to people all day for a living, but all those
easy answers you are giving—are you really living your life that
way? Portland is a long way from L.A.” Get that tattooed on your
face. You see kids, Larry is recently divorced and has to raise his
kids, but he’s a miserable failure so he has to move to Portland.
Portland in the 70s. Somehow I doubt there was any craft beer or
Thai food. He was probably murdered by a serial killer after season
2. Just like the ending to “Frasier”!

When was the last time a TV theme song backhandedly insulted the
town it was in? Any show that doesn’t take place in NY or L.A.
normally takes some kind of perverse pride in its loser city
status. Look at “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.” Nothing wrong
there. Seems like a nice town. “Cheers”—who wouldn’t want to go to
Boston if that’s the kind of bars they have? Or, uh, what’s another
show that took place outside of New York or California. Uh… and
didn’t have David Kelly involved. Oh, I don’t know, “Deep Space
Nine.”

Sarah: I’m torn between taking offense at the
characterization of Portland, my beloved home, as a city of
failures, and vastly preferring that characterization to the one
that Portland has now. Portland may now be crammed with free-range
organ meats and redolent of rhubarb-sage compotes and oh God I
can’t even finish this sentence because it’s the start to every
lifestyle magazine article written about Portland in the last five
years. But before Portland was a twee wonderland, it was the town
where Mrs. LaVona Harding beat her daughter Tonya with a hairbrush
as punishment for a lousy skating routine , the town where
Bambi Bembenek limped into hospice care and D.B. Cooper boarded a
727 with an extortion plan so crazy it just had to work. So why
can’t it also be the town where McLean Stevenson came to bask in
obscurity—Portland! ha!—and milk some alleged humor out of his new
hometown?

Michael: The point is that themes are supposed to make
the location seem homey, comfortable, safe, an enjoyable place to
stick around in, and not the armpit of America. People would have
you think that this show never existed. No one talks about it. It’s
not even on ION, and they play that episode of “Criminal Minds”
where Jason Alexander is a serial killer all the time. “Hello,
Larry”: ode to the terrible town, the show that television history
wants to forget–but if we forget the sins of the past, we’ll just
have more episodes of “2 Broke Girls.”

2. and 3. “Voyagers!” and “Cover Up!”: Have Prop Gun, Will
Travel Through Time

Sarah: 80s TV themes also take you down some strange
rabbit holes. When I stumbled across the opening for “Voyagers!”, a
kind of proto-“Quantum Leap” that was canceled after only 20
episodes, I was immediately smitten. The show, which centers on
professional time traveler Phineas Bogg and child history buff
Jeffrey Jones, includes an episode in which the characters somehow
interact with Cleopatra, Isaac Newton, and Babe Ruth, and another
in which have to keep Princess Victoria from marrying a Russian
duke (who for some reason has to win a shooting competition with
Annie Oakley). I can’t help feeling that my childhood would have
been vastly improved if the show had lasted for eight or nine
seasons instead of one.

What I read more about the show’s star, however—the slightly
Ryan O’Neal-esque Jon-Erik Hexum—was even stranger. This site has
already delved into the glory that is Hexum, and you probably
have to watch an episode of “Voyagers!” yourself to really
understand how odd it is that the show wasn’t successful, boasting,
as it did, a jodhpur-wearing, basso profondo Harry Hamlin knockoff.
The real question, though, is why he wasn’t in anything else, and
the bizarre answer is this: after “Voyagers!” was cancelled, Hexum
starred on a new show, “Cover Up,” about a female fashion
photographer (Jennifer O’Neill) who teams up with an ex-Green Beret
(Hexum, of course), who goes undercover as a male model so they can
fight crime together. (I know.) While filming the eighth episode of
“Cover Up,” Hexum got bored between takes and fired a prop gun at
his temple, accidentally killing himself when the force of the
blank round propelled a quarter-sized piece of his skull into his
brain. To make matters even stranger, his costar, Jennifer O’Neill,
had accidentally shot herself the year before in her own home,
while trying to find out if an illegally obtained handgun was
loaded or not. (It was.) O’Neill, who also starred in David
Cronenberg’s Scanners in 1981, has now been married nine
times to eight husbands and currently runs a horse farm in
Tennessee. You can’t make this stuff up.

Now, “Cover Up” is the kind of show whose actual premise is too
insane to be topped by anything you might conjecture if you were
just watching the theme blind, but other openings provide a little
more room. Michael, for this next round, I’m going to play you some
of the stranger and more wonderful themes I’ve come across, and
let’s try to figure out what the show was about. (There are
Wikipedia entries for an astonishing number of these failed shows,
but where’s the fun in that?)

4. “Star of the Family” (1982): We Already Miss You, Jon-Erik
Hexum

Sarah: So I’ll go first. My best guess: As you can tell
from the horrifying jump-roping that starts a few seconds in,
Michael Dudikoff plays Skippy, a burgeoning serial killer a la
Patrick Bateman, for whom obsessive exercise is the only way of
staving off homicidal urges. Brian Dennehy plays his long-suffering
father, also the only one who knows Skippy’s secret: that he has
already murdered three Linda Ronstadt-esque country/rock singers,
and will undoubtedly kill again. This is bad news for Dennehy,
whose beloved daughter Melinda is also trying to crack into the
Ronstadt knockoff business. Every night he watches her on TV,
comforted by the fact that she remains unharmed, but nonetheless
helpless in his attempt to choose between his two children in a
dilemma or Oresteian proportions.

Michael: Seventeen seconds into this and I’m confused.
Sarah, what is? Is this a show about seven brothers marrying seven
cows? Or are those buffalo? I’m from Long Island! I don’t know how
animals work! Or marriage! Or if the sun revolves around the earth
or the earth around the sun or a turtle or what.

Oh good. Now the lyrics come in and I’m watching a Tide
commercial. Also there are clearly five brothers on horses. Not
seven. Way to count.

Oh hey! Richard Dean Anderson (aka MacGyver) is one of the seven
brothers (even though I only saw five) searching for seven brides,
as the theme song tells us, and he’s riding a horse and not
marrying a cow. I think.

Tim Topper as Evan. That is all.

So seven successful cattle ranchers are tired of having sex with
their cows, and each other, so they’re looking for seven brides.
They also like soft jazz. And Jeeps! They wrangle their cattle with
Jeeps! That’s how farms work, right? With Jeeps!

“Dreaming, visions at night of the life they’ve planned” means
dreaming of boning ladies and not each other, which is the sad
reality of the seven brothers.

Sarah: Personally, I’m more intrigued by “Loving each
other and living with pride.”

Oh hey, a lady. Man. I hope she’s not the only bride in the
show. From what I can tell the brothers have to fight to the death
to marry her.

Sarah: My personal theory about this show is that it
depicts the seven sons of a couple of Broadway actors, who love
“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” so much that they moved out west
to try to make the story their reality, while also making the
Wyoming theater scene something to write home about.

6. “Paper Dolls” (1984): Possibly The Greatest Show That Has
Ever Existed

Sarah: My GOD, there’s a lot going on here. Let’s break
down what we learn from these credits.

• This is a show about ladies who put lipstick on with A BRUSH!
So, you know right way, they’re better than you.

• The show’s characters are not just beautiful but INTIMIDATING
to you, middle-American woman aged 24-36, since they wear silver
bat wings and pin all their hair directly above your foreheads. So
you’d better watch, or they’ll make fun of you and your shitty
Jordache jeans. (The characters on this show haven’t even
heard of jeans.)

• Houston, we have Morgan Fairchild.

• And a tired Lloyd Bridges.

• “Introducing Nicollette Sheridan.” Riding a seashell to
shore.

• One night, Zeus descended to the earth in the form of a
thousand doves and mated with Morgan Fairchild. She gave birth to
Jon-Erik Hexum, Nicollette Sheridan, and 50 Bonne Bell Lip
Lites.

Michael: Ah! Jesus. What a way to open a show. Floating
eyes and the lyrics kicking in: “Hello!” This is terrifying. “It’s
me!” Who? Who’s talking to me? “And only you can see me.” God.
Where’s my Lexapro. I’m having an anxiety attack right now. “I just
saw the most beautiful ghost in the world.” So, am I to understand
this is a show about a man in love with a ghost? “And she slept
here.” In my room! OH MY GOD! BURN IT DOWN!

The entire opening credits are rendered in artists’ sketches,
not unlike police sketches. I’m not sure who the ghost is, but
remember that scene in Ghostbusters where Dan Akyrod has sex
with a ghost? Yeah. He insisted that be in it, probably.

I kind of want to watch every episode of this now.

8. “Murphy’s Law” (1988-1989): Not To Be Confused With
“Murphy Brown”

Michael: Is George Segal a detective? Shouldn’t this show
be about a lawyer and not a detective? This feels like a “Mad TV”
parody of a TV show.

Sarah: I’m going to admit right here and now that, as a
preteen, I harbored a vague crush on George Segal. So I wish I
could settle in with a tape of “Murphy’s Law,” which makes the
interesting choice of exploring the sexual tension between George
Segal (already fairly old and somewhat portly) and a beautiful,
much younger Asian-American woman. Segal looks like he plays a
slightly sleazy Times Square talent agent who makes most of his
money off peep shows. Meanwhile, from what I can surmise, actress
Maggie Han plays a beautiful spy who takes a job in Segal’s peep
show in order to escape surveillance from her old bosses at SMERSH.
Josh Mostel obviously plays one of a host of Newman impersonators
employed by George Segal’s Rent-a-Newman business (for work! play!
or home!), “Hello, Newman!”

A fun fact about Maggie Han, per her Wikipedia
page: “At the age of 16, Han enrolled at Harvard University.
Upon the suggestion of a stranger, she contacted a local modeling
agency and began working part time. When she was offered more jobs
than she could handle, Han decided to pursue modeling as a
full-time career. Partway into her sophomore year, Han went to
Paris and modeled for six years. When she returned to America, she
went back to Harvard to finish her studies.” If anyone could have
saved Jon-Erik Hexum from his own idiocy, it was Maggie Han. Also,
imagine their children.

9. “Lady Blue” (1985-1986): Post-“Falcon Crest”

Sarah: One of the many 70s and 80s gimmick shows in which
the protagonist being a lady and a cop was enough of a
gimmick by itself. (Actually, this is still pretty much the case.)
Obviously, this show was built around the premise of a strong “will
they or won’t they?” vibe between Jamie Rose of “Falcon Crest” and
Danny Aiello, and was immediately canceled when the showrunners
realized that Danny Aiello is in fact an asexual organism.

10. “Raising Miranda” (1988): Walter White In LA Gear

Michael: It’s Bryan Cranston (as Russell) and he has a
mullet, bad stubble, and a sleeveless shirt. It looks like he plays
a wacky neighbor or something in this one. Two people are raising
Miranda, but we don’t care about them. Maybe this is where it all
started. Maybe this is where Bryan became the one who knocked.
Maybe it’s about him murdering a family. I mean. Look at that
smile.

(Note: We’ve broken this story into two pages solely to keep
from breaking anyone’s browser.)